Farrukh Ghori

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The Year of Lady Hadid: the Very Best of Zaha Being Zaha

While she's churned out quite the parade of undulating,watery designs since winning a Pritzker Prize in 2004, swoop enthusiast and color eschewerZaha Hadid, has enjoyed a special kind of profligacy in 2013, spitting out rapid-fire a whole host of edgeless buildings and furnishings—from $160K dining tables toSlinky-like shoes to superyachts. Another example: Hadid's renderings for her addition to the Messner Mountain Museum (above), a smattering of buildingsstrung through the Dolomites of Northern Italy. These and more, below.

↑ In January, just as Hadid's Wangjing SOHO complex was rising in Beijing, a rip-off of the project, called Meiquan 22nd Century, was rising in Chongqing. Team Zaha—in particular the SOHO China developers behind the three elliptical, jelly bean-like structures—was none too pleased that the design has been copied and might even win a lawsuit if that's where this is headed. Meanwhile, Meiquan 22nd Century developer Chongqing Meiquan said they "Never meant to copy, only want to surpass." (Oh, snap!) [link]

↑ A smaller-scale design is this $160K acrylic-and-resin dining table, which wasnominated in the furniture segment of the London Design Museum's 2013 Design of the Year Awards. Each surface of the Liquid Glacial Table's four parts is hand crafted to look like cloudless water, rippled by wind and slurping to the floor. [link]

↑ Currently under construction in the desert on the northern outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC) is among the most stylistically ambitious of Hadid's designs, a giant honeycomb that provides shade for a series of planted courtyards. [link]

↑ Currently still in the planning stages, Dorobanţi Tower would become one of the tallest buildings in Bucharest, Romania. The tower will house a hotel, casino, luxury residences, and offices, with a floor area of over 790,000 square feet. [link]

↑ Bankrolled by a prominent Beirut businessman and politician, this structure will house a public policy institute attached to the American University of Beirut. [link]

↑ The centerpiece of a sprawling riverfront development in the heart of Rabat, Morocco, this theater complex will include three performance spaces: a 2,050-seat main theater, a smaller 520-seat space, and a 7,000-seat outdoor amphitheater. The total cost is estimated at $156M. [link]

↑ Designed for Russian real estate mogul Vladislav Doronin and his supermodel girlfriend Naomi Campbell, this spaceship-like house in Moscowincludes a section that looks like a Jetsons treehouse. [link]

↑ After two years of delays, this cultural and design center in South Korea was once due for completion in 2013. (Verdict's still out.) The giant complex has a total area of 915,000 square feet and will house a design museum, library and educational facilities, plus a park to provide coveted urban green space. [link]

↑ Hadid designed Lo Storto—Italian for the "Twisted One"—one of three starchitect-designed towers currently rising in northwest Milan. She also proposed the design for seven smaller-scale residential buildings in the same complex. [link]

↑ For the metro station and transportation hub at the financial district of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Hadid has proposed a curvy, streamlined structure that looks a bit like a beached cruise ship from the year 2180. Inside, the 220,000-square-foot building is a mesh of skybridges, pathways, and slanted, curving supports, and a "three-dimensional lattice defined by a sequence of opposing sine-waves" to optimize pedestrian traffic flow. [link]

↑ This year Hadid opened her first-ever permanent gallery and showroom, stocking the central London gallery with the one has come to expect from curve obsessive. Inside: ribbed black furniture that reads like an oil slick, sculptural chandeliers that sag toward the ground, sculpted jewelry, an entire floor of white-and-silver architectural models. [link]

↑ Hadid's dark, jagged design for Glasgow's Riverside Museum of Transport, which opened in 2011 but was named European Museum of the Year in 2013, came as a pleasant surprise from the notoriously colorless, edgeless architect. The structure's particular brand of zig-zag, like a steel-plated EKG, makes the building look simultaneously like a child's scribble and a hand-smelted, pistachio-colored architectural prize. In fact, the museum, recently named European Museum of the Year, is supposed to "encapsulate a wave or pleat, flowing from city to waterfront, symbolizing the dynamic relationship between Glasgow and the shipbuilding, seafaring, and industrial legacy of the river Clyde," Hadid has written. [link]

↑ The Heydar Aliyev Centre, nearing completion, will be a cultural center for the oil-rich capital of Baku, Azerbaijan. [link]

↑ NY Magdescribed the renderings for Hadid's first NYC project as "the delightful Earth home for the weary intergalactic superrich." To us, the 11-story structure—slated to house 37 "expansive" residences—looks like a stack of drifting dew drops, and well, that's pretty awesome, actually. [link]

↑ Hadid's Innovation Tower, which wrapped construction this year at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is a familiar strain of glassy, shapeless futurism—an iceberg-like mass that's something like a first cousin of her watery condo plans for NYC and a counterpart to her cruiseship-like plans for a metro station in Saudi Arabia. [link]

↑ In August Hadid unveiled a more detailed look at her firm's plans for "converting"—not really sure how that term fits, considering it is not likely to resemble, in any way, shape, or form, the building that used to be there—an old textiles factory in Belgrade, Serbia. The plans, color- and corner-less, swirl in a mass of apartments, offices, and "leisure facilities," including a five-star hotel, galleries and shopping. [link]

↑ She also signed on for a series of boutiques for the shoe brand Stuart Weitzman. The first one (above), the 100th Stuart Weitzman boutique in the world, opened in Milan; others, in New York, Hong Kong, and Rome, will roll out next year. This particular store, which measures 3,000 square feet, has fiberglass displays dipped in rose gold and "is fluid and playful." [link]

↑ Hadid's extension for the Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens is an undulating structure that looks like white putty draped on top of glass walls. The structure's curves, a clear homage to futurism, are hardly surprising coming from the starchitect whose renown stems from a portfolio brimming with fluid, colorless buildings, though this may be her debut in the realm of the Play-Doh-esque. [link]

↑ In October, Hadid's library for the Vienna University of Economics and Business opened its doors to the public, unveiling a jutting black box made of glass and fiber-reinforced concrete panels that sits on the roof of the building, creating an overhang above the main entrance. [link]

↑ Leave it up to Zaha to turn something as ubiquitous and sweet as a dollhouse into a deconstructed piece of colorless, avante-garde design. In November the dollhouse sold at auction for £14,000, or $22,361. [link]

↑ This year Hadid took her talents to the high seas, embarking on a new line of superyachts with German shipbuilders Blohm+Voss. [link]

↑ Hadid's limited-edition bottle for Leo Hillinger Winery was apparently "derivedfrom the profile of liquid droplets, a continuous spatial curve was then projected onto the bottle's surface ... suggesting the waves created when droplets break a liquid's surface." [link]

↑ Hadid's One Thousand Museum in Miami, underway right now,boasts an exoskeleton that's "a fusion of architectural and structural expression." Indeed the "flow lines of the exoskeleton accentuate the design and connect at critical nodes for structural stability," Hadid has said. What else do we know? It's appropriately devoid of angles, with a suh-weet indoor pool and surprisinglyhumdrum kitchens. What does the undistinguished herd have to say? "It will look as dated as Disney's TomorrowLand." And: "It looks ready for a diaper change." Tough crowd. [link]

↑ A new set of renderings revealed last month for the upcoming Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar drew Internet commenters out of the woodwork to state the obvious: though it may be ostensibly modeled after the Dhow, a classic Arab fishing vessel, it looks more than vaguely anatomical. [link]

↑ Hadid also very recently partnered up with Swiss jewelry company Caspita to create rings and a cuff of latticed gold, inspired by "naturally occurring cell structures," per T Magazine. “There is a lot of fluidity now between jewelry design, architecture and art — a lot more cross-pollination in the disciplines,” Hadid toldT. [link]

↑ This holiday season, one can also buy a (rather ugly?) ornament designed by the starchitect. The swervy, Grinch-colored orb will be auctioned for a charity benefitting inner-city kids in London. [link]